ODC maintains its own telephone interviewing center in Philadelphia, PA. This allows us to ensure the highest quality of interviewing. For research firms that do not have their own interviewing services, interviewing is a ‘black box': they send out the questionnaire and wait to see what comes back. From the initial study to the final recommendations, ODC is involved in every step of the research process.

All ODC telephone interviewers utilize Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) software. The use of CATI introduces several advantages to the survey process. It virtually eliminates the chance of an interviewer skipping a question or entering a response that is outside the range of valid responses. CATI keeps track of all calls made to each sample point, providing extensive documentation of the number of attempts, the results of calls and final case disposition.

For example, the CATI system can track the number of times each potential respondent was called, and the result of each call, i.e. how many times there was no answer or an answering machine was reached. ODC can track this data and the amount of remaining sample and provide our clients with up-to-the-minute information. Finally, the CATI system greatly reduces the amount of effort needed to clean the data.

Our telephone capabilities include the following:

• Thirty-five Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) stations with additional access to 200 CATI stations
• Quota control by demographics, location, incidence or any research question
• Automatic call scheduling by day of week, time of day, time zone and attempt number
• Ability to provide complete data sets in a variety of industry-standard formats
• Nightly data back-up on tape
• Server computer with an uninterruptible power supply to protect data connected to interviewing stations via a Novell Network

Our telephone interviewing center also offers:

• Full-time supervision and monitoring
• Professional, experienced, interviewers and supervisors
• Continuous, random monitoring of all telephone interviewers
• Verbatim recording of all open-ended responses as expressed by respondents

Quality control procedures include: a detailed training and briefing session for each research study; a review of all completed questionnaires to detect procedural errors and omitted questions; follow-up interviews to finish any incomplete questionnaires; rejection and replacement of questionnaires with a significant number of errors and a final review of all the interviewers' work.

As a client of ODC, you are welcome to visit our interviewing facility at any time. You also have the option of monitoring your company's study in real time, either at the center, or via telephone.